The proposed research would investigate the development of the semantic information storage system in the young child by determining the associative connections available to, and preferentially utilized by, children from four to eight years of age. A particular objective is to explore the possibility that the various cognitive limitations of the young child (well documented by such researchers as Piaget and his colleagues) might be mediated by an unsystematic, pre-hierarchical memory system which is only gradually transformed into the adult organization. The primary experimental tool would be a modified recognition procedure in which the subject has to decide whether or not a given word was included in the previously heard sentence. The probe word is either a word related in one of a number of systematic ways (e.g., antonymy, synonymy, and superordinate-subordinate relations) to a word contained in the sentence, a repetition of a sentence word, or a totally unrelated word. To the extent that the subject requires more time to reject a related word, it is assumed that his meaning system incorporates features shared by the probe word and one of the sentence words. The tasks that have generally been posed to children, including free association, free recall, and definition of vocabulary words, require retrieval of stored information. One cannot determine from the resulting data whether the child's difficulties stem from an inadequately cross-referenced conceptual system or simply from inadequate retrieval or decision-making processes. A recognition task, since it taps the automatic (and perhaps unconscious) encoding that occurs as part of understanding a word that is heard, may reveal an underlying competence that the child cannot verbalize or deliberately apply. A child's education should ideally be structured so as to bring out just such latent abilities.